The Professors

(An office at a college.  MARIE and EILEEN are sharing a drink.  It’s EILEEN’s office.  We’re joining the scene mid-conversation.)

MARIE:  …I really just need to divorce him.

EILEEN:  Marie, you’ve been married for thirty years—

MARIE:  Exactly.  I married him before I knew any better.

EILEEN:  You’ll never get a divorce before this comet hits.  It’s the weekend.  If we were within hours of Mexico maybe, but—

MARIE:  Things can’t be that well with you and Nathan either, Eileen.  Otherwise you wouldn’t be sitting in your office—

EILEEN:  Speak up, dear.  My hearing—

MARIE:  --SITTING in your office—drinking with me.

EILEEN:  We’re done drinking.  I’m drunk.  And I’m out.

MARIE:  There’s that new liquor store a block from the campus.  They’re staying open late for the special occasion.

EILEEN:  Eventually we’re going to have to go home.

MARIE:  I dread summer.

EILEEN:  There’s nobody on-campus.  I saw two kids breaking into the dorms earlier.  They probably figure it’ll be safer than.  But where are you safe from a falling comet?

MARIE:  It means endless days and nights at home.

EILEEN:  You used to go to Barcelona every summer.

MARIE:  We had the house there—well, the villa—whatever.  It was rented, but the trip just got to be—I’d love it once we got there, but the trip was just too much.  It seemed like it was a few quick weeks of fun and then months of packing and unpacking and packing and unpacking.

EILEEN:  Makes you wonder—

MARIE:  How much of my life has been spent actually doing things and how much has been me preparing to do things, or waiting to do things.  Looking forward to things—

EILEEN:  I can’t believe the world will end before I do.  I hate to feel good about it, but—it’s sort of thrilling.  In a way, it means everyone living now is invincible.  Because we’re going to live past humanity.

MARIE:  Don’t be so lofty, Eileen.  We’re all going to die.  It’s going to be quick, but it’s still going to happen.  And there isn’t going to be anything nice about it.

EILEEN:  But how lovely is it that so many questions are about to be answered?

MARIE:  What questions?

EILEEN:  Time travel.  Doesn’t exist.  Never will.  Otherwise somebody from the future would have come back to warn us.  Otherwise there would be a future.

MARIE:  Aliens?  U.F.O.’s?

EILEEN:  We’ll never know.  Although I doubt they’d study a doomed species.  Unless they didn’t know we were doomed.  Maybe they’re somewhere right now, mere miles away from earth watching us and thinking—Well, there goes all that work.

MARIE:  God?

(A moment.)

EILEEN:  Tricky.

MARIE:  This could be a punishment.

EILEEN:  This could just be a setback.  The history of the world is—

MARIE:  --Extensive.

EILEEN:  --A million years from now, after the comet hits, we could be right back where we started.

MARIE:  And do you think there’ll be zombies?

EILEEN:  There will most definitely be zombies.

MARIE:  I hope I get to be a zombie.  I’d eat my husband first.

EILEEN:  You know, now I regret not taking that deal they offered me a few years back when they wanted me to retire.

MARIE:  What was the deal?

EILEEN:  They said—if I retired, they would name the new Fine Arts building after me.

MARIE:  What did you say to them?

EILEEN:  I told them that having a building named after you is something that should only happen after you die.  Or when you’re a hundred and five, sitting in a wheelchair, old and decrepit, clapping when they unveil your name etched into the side of a building, completely unaware of what’s happening so that it really means nothing to the person it’s supposed to mean the most to.

MARIE:  And now--?

EILEEN:  I’d really like that building.  I’d like a concrete representation of my achievements.

MARIE:  No great achievements are concrete, Eileen.  Achievements like a happy marriage, a good relationship with your children—

EILEEN:  Friendships.

MARIE:  Please, we’re academics and we’re drunk.  Let’s not get emotional, shall we?

EILEEN:  Who said I was talking about our friendship, you old bitch?

(They laugh.)

MARIE:  So much time in these offices.  Yours, mine—

EILEEN:  When we say ‘life’s work,’ we mean it.

MARIE:  A lifetime at this place.

EILEEN:  There are worse places to spend a lifetime.

MARIE:  Do you think we would still like each other if it wasn’t for this place?  If you bumped into me on the street—

EILEEN:  I’d think you were a crazy homeless woman and I’d claim to not have any cash on me.

MARIE:  I’d think you were a society matron—probably from upstate New York.  A Conservative, pro-life, pro-gun, pro-lipo—

EILEEN:  There’s nothing wrong with lipo.

MARIE:  Funny who you wind up sitting across from the night the world’s going to end, isn’t it?

EILEEN:  I don’t mind winding up here, you know.  But you should call your husband.

MARIE:  You call yours first.

EILEEN:  I have to sober up first.  He’ll smell the alcohol over the phone.  Nathan is the strict mother I never had.

MARIE:  Better make sure you’re home for curfew.  What did you tell him anyway?

EILEEN:  That I was going to the office to hang out with Marie.  Same thing I’ve been doing for years.

MARIE:  And what did good old Nathan say?

EILEEN:  He said ‘Tell Marie I love her, and I’ll miss her if this all happens the way they say it’s going to.’

MARIE:  I should have married him.  Why did I let you marry him?

EILEEN:  Because you weren’t willing to shave your legs.

MARIE:  It was the 70’s.

EILEEN:  I shaved my legs in the 70’s.

MARIE:  You shaved everything in the 70’s.

EILEEN:  Don’t be vile, Marie.

MARIE:  We need more wine.

EILEEN:  We need to call two taxis.  One for you, one for me.

MARIE:  But after this…

EILEEN:  Yes.  This will be our last office session, I suppose.

MARIE:  Will you miss me more than Nathan will?

EILEEN:  A million times more.  You know, we fear losing our spouses and dying, losing ourselves, but…friends.  We just never think about losing friends, do we?  Maybe because it’s more painful than we can handle thinking about.

MARIE:  Well…if we go, we go together.

EILEEN:  We’ll all go together.

MARIE:  You can call that taxi.  I have to be with my husband.  I’m practically legally bound to die lying next to him.  It might have even been in the vows.

EILEEN:  How about we just sit for a second first?  Just sit with each other?

MARIE:  That’s fine with me, Eileen.

(A moment.)

That’s just fine.

(And so, they sit.)